Provoking Preferences by Changing Beliefs

志愿组织对成员的要求差别很大。政党、工会、宗教协会和各种各样的利益集团对信徒的期望表现出巨大的差异。这个项目关注的是组织要求自我牺牲的情况。它的重点是一个联盟，国际长岸和仓库联盟(ILWU)，其组织文化促使成员承诺合作和牺牲，并已持续了70多年，尽管人口、技术和政治发生了重大变化。该项目将收集数据，以审查工会成员和组织对劳动人民的政治态度和活动的影响。这些数据将有助于在组织中更广泛地建立信念变化和偏好发展的来源。研究方法使用调查、重点访谈、选举数据分析、人种学实地工作和正式建模，并建立在调查者早期研究的比较、历史和定性案例研究的结果基础上。结果将是细微差别和详细的数据，这些数据捕捉到了工人们随着时间的推移的观点，同时为工会如何改变成员的信念提供了证据。调查人员拥有非同寻常的数据，可以评估该项目的主要论点--无论是过去的还是现在的。对新登记的工作申请者的随机选择，即对那些处于沿海工作职业阶梯第一级的工人的命名，类似于一种自然实验，国际劳工联合会允许在西海岸的几个主要码头对这些新工人和现有工人进行面试。工会还允许在接下来的几年里重复进行几次调查。这项调查允许比较新员工和现有员工在一段时间内的偏好、信念、态度和政治参与水平。这项调查收集了标准的人口统计信息，对于这项研究来说，最重要的是关于受访者对政治、经济、工会和国际劳工联合会的看法的信息。调查小组的设计使调查人员能够跟踪随着时间的推移而发生的变化，并确定随着他们在职业社区中沉浸的时间延长，新一批工人的观点、信念和报告的行为是否以及朝着什么方向发生变化。这三波调查将揭示：1)海滨新员工的观点在多大程度上与更多长期工作的工人一致；2)工会的培训和合同谈判经验如何塑造他们的态度；3)新工人在多大程度上改变了工会。虽然这项研究的实证焦点是工会，但这一论点广泛适用于几乎所有类型的志愿组织。了解组织实践、信仰变化和成员如何对偏好进行排名之间因果联系的性质，对于关注一系列出于意识形态动机的行为的政策制定者具有重要的广泛影响，包括参与一些世界上最紧迫的冲突的一些团体所表现出的行为。

Voluntary organizations vary significantly in the demands they make of members. Political parties, labor unions, religious associations, and a wide variety of interest groups exhibit tremendous variation in their expectations of adherents. This project is concerned with cases where the organization demands self-sacrifice. It focuses on a union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose organizational culture provokes membership commitments to cooperation and sacrifice and has continued to do so for more than seventy years, despite major demographic, technological, and political changes. The project will collect data for examining the influence of union membership and organization on the political attitudes and activities of working people. These data will help establish the sources of belief change and preference development in organizations more generally.The research approach uses surveys, focused interviews, electoral data analysis, ethnographic field work, and formal modeling and builds on findings from the comparative, historical, and qualitative case studies of the investigator's earlier research. The result will be nuanced and detailed data that capture workers' perspectives over time while providing evidence for how the union changes members' beliefs. The investigators have extraordinary access to the kind of data needed to evaluate the project's main arguments-both in the past and the present. The randomized selection of applicants for jobs as newly registered Identified Casuals, the nomenclature for those workers on the first of the occupational rungs of longshore work, approximates a natural experiment, and the ILWU has permitted interviews of these new as well as existing workers on several major West Coast docks. The union is also permitting repeat surveys several times over the next years. The survey allows for a comparison of the preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and political participation levels of incoming and existing workers over time. The survey gathers standard demographic information and, most importantly for this study, information concerning respondents' perspectives on politics, economics, unions, and the ILWU. The panel design of the survey allows the investigators to track changes over time and determine if and in what directions the views, beliefs, and reported behaviors of the new cohort of workers change as their immersion in the occupational community lengthens. The three survey waves will reveal: 1) how much the views of new waterfront employees converge with more long-serving workers; 2) how, if at all, the union's training and the experience of a contract negotiation shapes their attitudes; and 3) the extent to which the new workers transform the union. While the empirical focus of this study is labor unions, the argument is broadly applicable to virtually all types of voluntary organizations. Understanding the nature of the causal link between organizational practices, belief change, and how members rank preferences has significant broader implications for policymakers concerned with a range of ideologically-motivated behaviors, including those exhibited by some of the groups involved in some the world's most pressing conflicts.